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Do NOT Buy a Samsung

In my long history of buying tech products, I've always kept an open mind about companies. I've always given every company a fair shot at proving itself worthy, trying out every brand imaginable, and given companies that have disappointed me a second shot. I've never told someone not to buy a particular brand.That changes today.Samsung is a brand unfit of your cash, trust and time. My experiences with its after-sales support, combined with the recklessness that appears to be behind the Galaxy Note 7 debacle, give the overall impression that the company doesn't really care about you. "We don't care if you leave us, millions more people come flocking to us everyday" it seems, they're saying.Case in point, my Samsung laptop recently encountered an audio driver issue which caused it to not play any audio. It has been put into a Samsung service center on two different occasions now, and each time coming back with a more serious issue. The first time, it came back with a Windows that encountered errors left and right, causing it to refuse to install anything from Office to driver updates. The second time, the laptop randomly shuts down, seemingly without cause.Only god knows what will happen next time.I encountered a similar issue with my Galaxy S7 earlier this year: it went into the repair center with water damage (admittedly my fault), came out certified to be once again water-resistant after I footed parts of the bill, only to be proven not so when it died being splashed by water in my pants pocket. The company would go on take well over a month and a half, after multiple visits to their repair center (the company would tell me my phone was OK to pick up and use, only for me to encounter things that weren't fixed within hours of using them: from non-working volume buttons, to broken microphones) and multitudes of calls, to finally fix a Galaxy S7 that should have never died in the first place. This suggests that the company is not really trying to fix your issues, but recklessly playing around and seeing if their fix sticks, breaking five things for every one they fix. It does not value your time or your continued support.The Note 7 debacle seems to back this up. The company rushed a product out to market to beat the iPhone 7, causing to issue a faulty design that made 2.5 million customers vulnerable to fire, rushed its original recall to get the device back up on shelves before too many flocked to Apple, and put even more at risk. It then kept strangely quiet as more fires lit up, seemingly playing a waiting game to see if the fires would fan themselves out, putting even more customers at risk than it already had, taking six days after a fire burst on a Southwest Airlines plane that thankfully was still on the ground, to finally kill a product that should have never made it out of the testing lab, and even if it did, should not have ever been rolled out as "safe" after its first recall.Time and time again, Samsung shocks me with the carelessness they seem to be treating their customers, seemingly resting on its brand name and sheer marketing to boost it to ever higher profits. Sometimes they make a really solid product, like their flagship phones arguably are (and I'm going to admit that with the exception of after-sales support, I've otherwise been satisfied with Samsung products). But more than anything, support is incredibly important. You've blown several hundred dollars on an electronics product, and you expect it to work safely and reliably, first and foremost. Sometimes, it doesn't, and the occasional issue is OK. Every company is going to ship out a bad apple at times. It's there that you truly see a company's commitment to its customers, and here, Samsung's irresponsible behavior means that there's a sizable chance that if you do encounter such an issue with its products, you're not going to get it fixed in any reasonable amount of time or effort.If I were you, I wouldn't take that chance. I repeat the statement I made at the beginning of this post: Samsung is unfit and unworthy of your time, money or support. You should not buy a Samsung product.

On one hand I get it- one of the biggest reasons I have an iPhone is due to Apple’s first class support and it has also pretty much led me to exclusively consider laptops and tablets from Apple, Microsoft and maybe Dell (though I don’t know if I’d want to lose there brick and mortar support). In the PC industry there are at least those three options though- all of which offer various different types of hardware for different people, when it comes to phones though no one else offers the support Apple does.
Google is trying to do something with software support which is nice but not enough and with basically everyone else you’re shit out of luck. If your phone is busted you have to ship it off to who knows where for who knows how long for who knows how much.
Unless you only ever want to buy iPhones- and plenty of people don’t- you’re kind of stuck with this kind of support limbo. This kind of support isn’t optimal but it isn’t really any less than what you’d expect from most any other Android OEM. It sucks but it really is one of those "deal with it" situations.

I used to think that Samsung really did have the best support, even ahead of Apple after my friends complained about lengthy wait times and high repair costs of their Macs and iPhones, while Samsung charges reasonable fees and usually got the work done very quickly. That first part still holds true, but the second unfortunately doesn’t.